Case Study: Backlink Crawling and Indexing Services

Many claims have been made in the backlink indexing space, and services continue to be launched and improved. Being exposed to these services through my current SEO efforts with GSA, I felt it was important to identify the most cost effective approach to indexing backlinks.In researching this topic, I was surprised to find very limited research covering this important topic. There was one commonly referenced study done in 2011, but the sample size was extremely small (just 500 links) and the results were quickly identified as suspect in the forums.For each service tested, we used 10,000 verified links produced by a standard GSA job containing all link types. These links were produced a maximum of 24 hours before submission to the service for this test. Where price was unreasonable (over $1 per thousand), the test was limited to 1,000 for that service. Indexing was checked using the index checker in Scrapebox with hundreds of US-based fully private proxies

A Visual Comparison of the Indexing Service Techniques

Understanding the similarities and differences between indexing services is much easier when looking at the information visually. Interestingly, the success rate of the various services isn’t correlated with the strategy they use, which is addressed in more detail in the conclusion.

Cost Analysis of the Services

Looking at the prices of the indexing options was very eye opening. Depending on the service, costs range from free all the way to $10 per 1,000 links. More interesting to me was the fact that the most expensive options didn’t always work the best as we’ll see in the next data table.

Indexing Results

Specific results will vary based upon link types used, and indexing rates of various services may change as either they improve their techniques or Google changes their indexing algorithms.

Indexing Results – Data

The data used in the chart above is included for further analysis. This data includes the three services that do not work.

Day0

Day 1

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Backlinks Indexer

0.5

2.1

3.2

4.3

6.5

8.1

8.3

Blog Comments

0.7

1.2

1.4

3.9

4.5

5.1

5.4

Control (Nothing done)

0.5

1.8

2.3

2.7

3.3

4.5

4.9

Lindexed

0.6

1.5

2.8

2.9

3.8

5.1

5.3

Linklicious

0.4

4.9

5.6

6.5

7.3

7.6

7.9

Indexification

0.3

1.9

3.3

4.2

6.7

8.1

8.5

Index Kings

0.5

1.3

1.9

2.3

3.5

4.7

5.1

Nuclear Link Indexer

0.4

11.2

11.9

12.1

13.3

14.8

15

One Hour Indexing

0.3

35.3

42.5

43.2

44.8

43.9

46.3

Ping Farm

0.4

1

2.3

2.5

3.3

4.2

4.5

Scrapebox Rapid Indexer

0.5

0.9

1.7

2.3

3

4.1

4.2

Xindexer

0.6

1.3

1.9

2.4

3.2

3.7

13.2

Conclusions

One Hour Indexing is the clear winner in both indexing rate and cost. They won’t disclose their methods, but clearly it’s something different than the other guys.

The requirements for indexing have changed over the past couple of years. It is now much harder to get links indexed.

The techniques used by the services don’t seem to have a strong impact on indexing. I expected services like Indexification and Lindexed to blow away the others since they have a hybrid method, but that didn’t happen.

A few services people recommend – Ping Farm, Index Kings, Scrapebox Rapid Indexer – literally do nothing since it just accesses a dynamic page (that Google never sees). Think about this when you read forum posts where people say it’s working great for them.

Notice the control group as well as the three services that don’t work to see variance in the numbers. The natural indexing rate isn’t a fixed number, but has some amount of variance.

Cost isn’t the primary deciding factor of which service is best. Instead, match the amount of links you build with the appropriate service(s).